About
Inspiral Carpets are an alternative rock band from Oldham in Greater Manchester, England formed by Graham Lambert and Stephen Holt in 1983. The band is named after a clothing shop on their Oldham estate. Their sound is based around psychedelic keyboards and guitars.
Schoolfriends Lambert and Holt recruited drummer Craig Gill, and formed Inspiral Carpets in 1983, originally as a garage punk band. After various other members had come and gone, by 1987 the line-up included bassist David Swift and organist Clint Boon (whose Ashton-under-Lyne studio the band had been using for rehearsals). The band released two albums worth of demos in the 1980s, Waiting for Ours and Songs of Shallow Intensity, including songs that would later be re-recorded.
They came to prominence, alongside bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, in the 'Madchester' scene of the late 1980s. After a flexi-disc featuring Garage Full Of Flowers given free with Manchester's Debris magazine in 1987, followed by the Cow cassette, their first release proper, the 1988 Planecrash EP on the Playtime label received much airplay from Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who asked the band to record a session for his show. At the time o…